The present embodiments relate to modeling of the heart or components of the heart, such as the mitral valve. Medical imaging data is used to create patient-specific modeling.
Dysfunctional mitral valves (MV) are found in a large variety of cardiovascular diseases. Mitral valve prolapse for instance, where the leaflets billow into the left atrium due to dysfunctional chordae, is a common cause of regurgitation. A pathological left ventricular (LV) function, such as ischemic or idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, may yield severe mitral valve insufficiency due to an enlarged mitral annulus or abnormal positioning of the papillary muscles.
Echocardiography is used for MV assessment. The complex appearance of the MV, the fast dynamics, the large morphological and functional variations among patients, and the varying image quality (e.g., low signal-to-noise ratio, signal dropout, and/or time varying appearance) make the automatic modeling of the MV from echocardiography challenging.
Valve models may be generated manually or interactively. The process may be elaborate, tedious, and prone to inter-user variability. Even automatic modeling may have difficulties due to the echocardiography data. Temporal consistency and physiologically realistic deformations are not guaranteed. In contrast, deformable models integrating prior knowledge about the cardiac deformation may estimate the cardiac motion from images. However, their application for valve dynamics is challenged by the very rapid valve motion.